Archives For national review

In short, the public debate about how Congress ought to respond to this latest mass shooting is guided by two broad principles. Dubious on their own, they are even more witless when combined. The first is the idea that the most important thing is to “do something.” The second is that we ought to look to high-schoolers for the answer.

For this advocacy — and that’s what it is — Hogg has been feted as a key leader within a “mass movement” that is determined to reform America; he has been praised for his attempt to “force change”; he has been cast, including by himself, as a lion who refuses to back down; and, in some of the more cunning quarters of the left, he has been turned into a walking demonstration of the need to lower the voting age. At no point has anyone hosting him suggested that his relevance is limited to his capacity to describe his experience; rather, he has in every instance been asked to join a public political fight — a fight, remember, that relates to nothing less foundational than the American Bill of Rights.

The deadly school shooting this month in Parkland, Florida, has ignited national outrage and calls for action on gun reform. But while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern.

Ironically, the media response to the memo simply validates the now ex-employee’s point when he writes:

unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber

and

silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.

What is left unsaid in most of the coverage is that the memo’s ideas are also a deadly threat to thousands of jobs in the “diversity” industry (e.g., Google’s VP of Diversity). People whose jobs depend on an uncritical acceptance of an ideological position naturally react badly to any critique of it.

Original memo: http://diversitymemo.com/#reply

Which is to say that, regardless of one’s view on the contents of the memo, the ostensibly “neutral” position is not likely to be a neutral position at all. Or, put another way: One can’t avoid delving into this in depth by contending bluntly that the details don’t matter, when, for better or worse, they absolutely do. As I wrote a couple of years ago, I am quite happy for private companies to respond to their customers and the culture in which they exist, and I do not wish to impose any laws that would prevent them from doing so. But to acknowledge that this is what they are doing is merely to move our point of inquiry from the companies themselves to the forces that inform their decisions. There is a severe imbalance in those forces, and one that’s worth remarking on. There’s no neutral position here, I’m afraid.

Do we find that “countries that lack gender equity in school enrollment” and “stereotypes associating science with males” have fewer women in tech?

No. Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality.

We should insist on procedural justice — which is to say, we should insist on the rule of law and on the equality of all people before it. But we ought not allow that insistence to be a bunker into which we retreat when we do not wish to think too hard about the real social and economic distance between black Americans and white Americans. The fact that we passed a new set of rules in 1964 is not in itself an accounting for what came before or an answer to what has happened since.